Older !

I am playing poker with a deck of insurance cards.  Having reached the magic age of almost-65 they are descending on me like rain.  Up until last month I had an Anthem medical card and an Anthem dental card.  Then I was told I had to sign up – again – with the government (how many times in my life have I done this for one reason or another?  If my file is thick imagine what the Mayor’s file looks like…) 

Now I have a Medicare card; a Humana medical card; a something-or-other eye care card and a dental card – still Anthem.  Oh, and a prescription card from some outfit called Express Scripts.  Almost enough to play a good game of Euchre with. 

In addition I have received at least twenty pounds of advertising from everybody from Gecko to AARP wanting me to sign up for their supplemental insurance programs.  While trying to convince me that all the cards that I now have certainly aren’t going to cover everything.  (They won’t.  That’s the nature of insurance recruitment, sales and deception.)

And I am getting ready to move.  A big life change for me, I’ve lived happily here for 16 years.  And I am going to live happily elsewhere with significantly less possessions and for about three hundred dollars less a month then where I am at now.  At a place on a lake where I can look down in the morning and watch the ducks shitting on the shore.  Sorry, I have a resentment against ducks.

The big change is that everybody in this place is fifty-seven or older.  Nobody is 21.  There are no young girls or guys.  I will hardly know how to behave (until one of those old gals invites me over for supper….).  My life is a lot older.  I don’t see this place as the last stop before I die and I intend to frolic happily there for a long time.

But time passes.  In spite of me.  I am corresponding with an elegant lady from my grade school days who is the same age as I am.  The last time I saw her was in 7^th grade and I think I was in love with her, until I was able to buy my next bag of marbles.  Attention is so fleeting!  Thinking back that far is almost going back to World War Two and I’m not sure all of my own kids know what that was exactly.  It truly does take my breath away, that was so long ago.

I take pills in the morning and walk around the block for exercise, instead of getting up at the crack of dawn and going to work to get trim and tanned and make money doing it.  If my warts and blemishes keep growing I will look someday like Franklin Roosevelt.

But I take life a day at a time.  Most of it has been rewarding.  Some of it was the pits.  It has all been interesting.  I am not guaranteed a tomorrow, could get hit by a bus.  But I have today and, creaky or not, I will frolic in the sun on my gimpy right leg for my todays until it’s time to shut it down.

And I have changed the color of this blog to Virginia Tobacco just because I can!  Ta!